The News Line: EditorialMonday, 12 February 2018ISRAEL SHAKEN BY SYRIAN MISSILE DEFENCES SUCCESS!THE ISRAELI ruling class has been shocked by Syrian missile defences being able to, and Syria having the audacity to, shoot down a US-supplied Israeli F-16 fighter that was attacking its people and its territory and had previously been invulnerable over the skies of the Arab Republic. The Israeli government has not been delivered such a shock since the Yom Kippur war which began on October 6th 1973 when Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and sought to drive the Israeli armed forces out of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Egyptian army was equipped with Soviet missiles at the time and used them with deadly affect to bring down more than 100 Israeli aircraft. No wonder Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has, since that loss of the F-16, had a telephone conversation with Russia’s President Putin to discuss the issue of Israeli air strikes in Syria.

The Russian press communique states: ‘The Russian side called for any steps, which might trigger a new spiral of dangerous for all confrontation in the region, to be avoided.’
In the meantime, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s press office said that Netanyahu agreed in a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin that interaction between the two countries’ militaries would be continued. ‘I have recently spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin,’ Netanyahu said, cited by his press office. ‘We agreed that security coordination between our countries will continue.’

He added: ‘I emphasised in the talk with him that it is our Israeli right and duty to defend ourselves from attacks from Syria.’ In the autumn of 2015, Israel and Russia agreed to exchange data in order to safeguard their militaries against any accidental engagements during operations in Syria. A special coordination centre was set up at Israel’s General Staff for that purpose.

At the same time as Putin has established security co-ordination with Netanyahu, Russia has assisted Syria in fighting the same terrorists that Israel is treating in special hospitals on the occupied Golan Heights. Russia has also had to establish security co-ordination with the Syrian armed forces with a joint missile command to fight the terrorists that have been used by the western powers to try to overthrow the Assad government since 2011, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians in the process. Israel is desperate to smash and destroy Assad so that it can move without any restraint not just against Hezbollah in the Lebanon but against the Palestinian people to make them its permanent colonial subjects.

Russia has has had to intervene in Syria, with the permission of the Syrian government, because Putin knows well that if the western powers overthrow Assad, then the Daesh and Nusra Front movements will be transferred to the Caucasus to begin a campaign to bring down the Russian government. Putin and Russia have intervened in Syria out of the needs of the Russian people for self preservation.

Since 2011 the Syrian people and their allies such as Hezbollah have shown incredible heroism and determination in battling against the Islamist mercenaries of the US, the UK and Turkey.
Their refusal to allow the removal of Assad has changed the situation entirely in the Middle East.
This is why Israel is desperate to to remove Assad, and equally desperate to smash the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon. It knows that without doing both it will not be able to impose a permanent colonial existence on the Palestinians.

The decision of Assad to use Syria’s missile capability to shoot down the Israeli jet is a blow for liberation movements all over the Middle East.
It creates an anti-imperialist bloc from Tehran to Beirut, and from Damascus to the Palestinian capital Jerusalem.

The workers of the UK and the world must support this bloc and assist it by imposing a worldwide boycott on Israel and by bringing down governments such as the May government in the UK that refuses to apologise for the Balfour Declaration, refuses to recognise the state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, and and insists on providing Israel with political, military and financial support.